Thursday, January 14, 2010

Web Stalking - a Whole New Level

If you haven't visited the Wow Armory recently, you should probably go check it out. There's a number of things that they've changed. First off, there's a pretty slick model viewer. You can even embed it into your own site (which I may do... eventually). For those of us that have authenticators, you no longer need to have the authenticator to log in to the armory (which you used to have to do).

And then they also added a Character Activity section. It's just... well... a bit too much information. It provides way too much information to easily stalk somebody. It tells you if they completed achievements or even part of achievements. If they looted a blue or purple item, it's on that list. If said item is currently equipped (that appears to be how it works), it will tell you that as well. It also tells when you killed a boss, and how many times that boss has been killed.

Now the boss kills is certainly information that has been on armory in the statistics for quite some time now. But it just seems to highlight even more that... I dunno.. for example, that I've only killed Loken in Heroic Halls of Lightning 4 times. Or that I've killed King Ymiron 9 times. I don't know... it just seems... too much.

It's not like a Big Brother thing. Maybe it's like an addiction thing. Like how I hate telling people my /played time. I don't even look at it myself. At one point, I had a mod that, among other things, would display my /played time when I logged in (or off, I forget which), and I'd close my eyes every time so I wouldn't see it.

And yes, I can choose not to look at it. But I don't really want people to be able to have verifiable information that I log on every day. lol. Maybe that's what it comes down to. Maybe I want my addiction to be a little more private. On the other hand, when my kids start playing, I'm sure I'll be checking this out every day.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

More Speculation for Blizzcon 2010

You know... it's really quite amazing at how much information isn't researched on the Internet. A couple of friends and I were talking about Blizzcon 2010 and trying to figure out who may or may not be going again this year. Keep in mind, there's no official date as of yet, but apparently BlizzPlanet did their research last week on the schedule of events at the Anaheim Convention Center. Wow.com picked up the story and ran with it, again using the same dates that BlizzPlanet did. And I'm sure there's at least a dozen other sites that have ran with this same information. (I'm a wee bit behind in my feed reader.)

So, per BlizzPlanet, the date will be August 20th and 21st, 2010. Okay... makes sense. The last scheduled date at the convention center is 8/13 and the next event is 8/26. Furthermore, Blizzcon was August 21st and 22nd in 2009. But what's wrong with October 22nd and 23rd? The last scheduled date there is 10/16 and the next one is 10/30. And Blizzcon 2008 was in October.

Now I'll give BlizzPlanet a break that maybe the Anaheim Convention Center changed their schedule from last week to this week. Web pages can change, so unless somebody got a screen shot, we'll never know what it was last week. And maybe Wow.com even did their on analysis on the Events Page as well... who knows.

But really, it's more fun to speculate, right? So, other possible dates: 11/12-11/13. (Which I think is probably too late in the year, but maybe I'm wrong.) Further trends: Each time they've done Blizzcon it's flipped between October and August. From Wikipedia: Blizzcon 2005: October. Blizzcon 2007: August. Blizzcon 2008: October. Blizzcon 2009: August. Blizzcon 2010: October? I'm not placing any bets, and I've got plenty of time to arrange my airline tickets. ;)